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New International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) findings show that Indian boys’ views about manhood and women’s roles in society became less patriarchal and more equitable after participating in an ICRW program that aimed to shift norms about gender equity.

The program, called Parivartan, drew in boys from Mumbai through the popular sport of cricket and challenged them to question traditional notions of manhood present in many societies, including their own. Results from ICRW’s evaluation provided proof that sensitizing boys to gender issues can potentially change stereotypes they hold and their attitudes about violence against women.

I started working on what became this book more than ten years ago, because I felt there was so much confusion in the way that large sections of the trade union movement and the Left responded to globalisation. They took a straightforward anti-globalisation position which, by default, reinforced a nationalist reaction against globalisation. This went against all my Marxist internationalist instincts. Also, having been involved in trade union research for decades, it was obvious to me that many of the evils attributed to globalisation, such as subcontracting and the shifting of production, had been rampant for years or decades prior to it. Most disturbing of all, much of the anti-globalisation rhetoric was indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the extreme Right. (I have given examples of this in my book.)

NEW DELHI: A Hindu woman or girl will have equal property rights along with other male relatives for any partition made in intestate succession after September 2005, the Indian Supreme Court has ruled, the Press Trust of India reported.

A bench of justices R M Lodhaand Jagdish Singh Khehar in a judgment said that under the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, the daughters are entitled to equal inheritance rights along with other male siblings, which was not available to them prior to the amendment.

Bina Agarwal is currently Professor of economics and director, Institute of economic Growth, Unversity of delhi, India. Agarwal has written and researched in areas including land, livelihoods and property rights, environment and development, the political economcy of gender, poverty, and inequality and agriculture and technological change. In 29 years of teaching students as well as government officials, she has focused on the interconnectedness of gender, pover and development.

The study reviews the formal and customary laws and practices governing the rights of women to inherit land in six South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). The study includes an analysis of existing laws and customs and their impact on inheritance and land rights in all six countries. It also provides recommendations for how to design interventions that can attempt to improve women’s inheritance rights.

An Indian village has banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they will arrange forbidden marriages that are often punished by death, a local official said today. The Lank village council decided unmarried boys could use mobile phones, but only under parental supervision, said one council member, Satish Tyagi. Local women's rights group criticised the measure as backward and unfair.

The lives and hopes of Samar (31) and Juwariya (25) Atique were brutally crushed in October 2009 by two men who threw a jug of acid on their faces as the women were returning home from a day's work in a rickshaw. Their crime - Juwariya had turned down a marriage proposal from one of the men! They sustained severe burns and injuries to their faces, their eyes and their upper bodies. In acid attack cases, the victims should be hosed down gently with a continuous stream of water immediately to stop the acid continuing to burn into their flesh. But they did not get treatment for five hours after the incident because the woman doctor was threatened with a similar attack by these men and their families.

Buddhi Devi was 14 when she was betrothed. In India, that is not unusual: many marry young. Her intended was a boy from her village who was two years younger — that, too, was not strange. But she was also supposed to marry her future husband’s younger brother, once he was old enough.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is supporting a new anti-child marriage movement in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where nearly half of all girls become child brides and one-third become teenage mothers even though the legal marriage age is 18. We need to have a zero-tolerance policy towards child marriage, so that every child, boy and girl, has the opportunity to live their childhood and gain an education said Karin Hulshof, UNICEF India Representative.

Breakthrough is an international human rights organization that uses media, education and pop culture to promote values of dignity, equality and justice in the United States and India. Mehrunissa and Tarannum are two women teachers in Lucknow. They talk about ideas of education and exposure among lower middle class Muslim societies, their own experiences, and prejudice faced by their friends and peers. They talk about their mothers and the remarkable perseverance they showed in educating their daughters.